
I hope that you are not too jaded, dear readers, to take this book to bed with you, because if you are an artist (and you are) and if you are a writer (and you are) then you need to know how the impossible is possible. You need this knowledge to dwell and swell within you.
Listen, this young American man went to Ukraine to find the woman who may (or may not) have helped his grandfather escape from the Nazis. He was only 20, and ill prepared for this task. He had only a photograph, a first name, and the name of a small village that no longer exists. He took a few scraps of something real and found or created a legendary great-great-great-great-great grandmother, a village, a history and he wove it all into true events in human history and told a story that is more efficacious than the truth.
This idea is not new. Tim O'Brien showed us this in The Things They Carried, and others long before him have demonstrated this as well. But you have not seen it on the level that Foer has given. You have not seen anything so luminous. Take a pencil with you on this journey, because you will want to underline numerous passages, and you will want to document the strange dreams you will have after you have read these passages, you will want to nurse the spell it casts on you, you will want to lie underneath the stars and feel the aftershocks of this book contract through your being.